Malek Bennabi

Algerian philosopher

Malek Bennabi (1 January 1905 – 31 October 1973) (مالك بن نبي) was an Algerian writer and philosopher, who wrote about human society, particularly Muslim society with a focus on the reasons behind the fall of Muslim civilization. According to Malek Bennabi, the lack of new ideas in Islamic thought emerged what he coined civilizational bankruptcy. He argued that in order to recover its former magnificence, Islamic society had to become an environment in which individuals felt empowered. In order to satisfy his spiritual and material needs, a Muslim needed to feel that his industry and creativity would find reward.

Bennabi was born in Constantine, Algeria in 1905. Educated in Paris and Algiers in engineering, he later based himself in Cairo, where he spent much of his time working extensively in the fields of history, philosophy and sociology. In 1963, after returning to Algeria, he witnessed modern scientific inventions and technological creations unfold before his eyes. This spurred him to reflect on the question of culture in the early nineteenth century. His approach was simple, not parroting what had been discovered before his time, but rather, searching for what constitutes the essence of culture and the birth of civilization.

From one of his works, Les Conditions de la Renaissance (1948), he defined culture as the mode of being and becoming of a people. This included aesthetic, ethical, pragmatic, and technical values. When these contents had been clearly defined, only then could various formulations of ideas be born. The birth of new ideas led to a dynamic society furthering the movement of vibrancy of a new civilization. In another book, The Question of Culture (1954), he said, the organisation of society, its life and movement, indeed, its deterioration and stagnation, all possessed a functional relation with the system of ideas found in that society. If that system were to change in one way or another, all other social characteristics would follow suit and adapt in the same direction. Ideas, as a whole, form an important part of the means of development in a given society. The various stages of development in such a society are indeed different forms of its intellectual developments. If one of those stages corresponds to what is called "renaissance", it will mean that society at that stage is enjoying a wonderful system of ideas; a system that can provide a suitable solution to each of the vital problems in that particular society. He added that ideas influence the life of a given society in two different ways; either they are factors of growth of social life, or on the contrary, the role of factors of contagion, thus rendering social growth rather difficult or even impossible.

His primary focus was on the term he coined called 'Post Almohad Men'. Modern society had left this man hollow due to a stultifying lack of aspiration. He said that in the nineteenth century, the relations among nations were based on power for the position of a nation was dependent on the number of its factories, cannons, fleets and gold reserves. However, the twentieth century introduced a new development in which ideas were held in high esteem as national and international values. This development has not been strongly felt in many underdeveloped countries, for their inferiority complex created a warped infatuation with the criteria of power that was based on material things. Muslims living in an underdeveloped country often felt that they were inferior to people living in a developed country. As a result of this inferiority, Muslims ascribed this distance to the field of objects. They assessed their situation as an abomination caused by the lack of weapons, aeroplanes and banks. Thus, their inferiority complex, based on social efficacy, would lead only to pessimism on the psychological level. On the social level, it would lead to what we have elsewhere called takdis (heaping up). To turn this feeling into an effective driving force, Muslims needed to ascribe their backwardness to the level of ideas, not to that of "objects", for the development of the new world depended increasingly on ideas and other such intellectual criteria. In underdeveloped countries, which were still within the sphere of influence of the superpowers, arms and oil revenues were no longer sufficient to support that influence. The world had, therefore, entered a stage at which most of its problems could be solved only by certain systems of ideas. Therefore, the Arabs and other Muslim countries, especially those that did not possess a great deal of material power, should give more weight to the issue of ideas. He believed that moral paralysis resulted in intellectual paralysis.

In his book, Bases of Civilization, Malek Bennabi put his theory of social change. He argues that we can split any given civilization into three basic elements: Man, soil (raw material) and time. This, then, becomes known as the civilization equation which he puts in this simple form: civilization = Man + soil + time. In a book announced by the Parisian publisher Erick Bonnier in October 2019, Dr. Zidane Meriboute (a former researcher teacher at the University of London, SOAS) " has conducted his own investigation to establish the truth about the activities of Bennabi's 'spouses' during the Second World War "; his book is based essentially on the archives of the DST and the French Court of Justice (Chartres and Paris Archives), hitherto kept in absolute secrecy. Extensive extracts from DST files and recitals of the Court of Justice of Chartres are included for the first time in this book, which was published in March 2020 The recitals of the Chartres Court of Justice's ruling of 6 April 1946 cleared Mr and Mrs Bennabi of all suspicion, the judge having concluded that "the accused were detained for many months on fanciful charges nothing of which could be retained".